The day Abbie Hoffman stole the show at Woodstock 1969
“If you ever heard about me in connection with the festival, it was not for playing Florence Nightingale to the flower children. What you heard was the following: ‘Oh, him, yeah, didn’t he grab the microphone, try to make a speech when Pete Townshend cracked him over the head with his guitar?’”
These are the words of Abbie Hoffman, the activist who stormed the stage during The Who’s performance at the original Woodstock Festival in 1969 to protest against the arrest and imprisonment of John Sinclair, a leading figure in the White Panther Party. A spinoff from the Black Panther Party led by civil rights activist Huey Newton, the White Panthers existed as a platform for white people to show their support in solidarity for what Newton and his followers were attempting to achieve in their pursuit of rights for black people in America.
Hoffman, a veteran of anti-war and pro-civil rights demonstrations across the US in the late 1960s, chose to interrupt a performance by The Who to deliver his message, not to deliberately sabotage their show over anyone else’s, but presumably due to the large audience they commanded. As Hoffman screamed into a microphone that he had managed to get his hands on, proclaiming “I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison,” Townshend was losing his rag at the intruder.
According to most versions of events, Townshend began swearing at Hoffman to “get the fuck off my stage”, allegedly charging towards him while armed with his guitar as a weapon of sorts and bashing him over the back of the head. Townshend has always vehemently denied attacking him, but has also always maintained a relatively controversial stance on the incident.
While agreeing in principle with Hoffman on his protest against Sinclair’s incarceration, he’s always maintained that he would have done exactly the same thing again, regardless of the message, given how he and the band were the ones who had been afforded the space to perform, not Hoffman or any other activist group.
However, the only unusual thing about all of these statements from Townshend, either denying that he hit Hoffman with his guitar or claiming that he’d do the same again, is that they don’t align with Hoffman’s own version of events. “I’ve seen countless references to the incident, even a mammoth mural of the scene,” Hoffman claimed.
“What I’ve failed to find was a single photo of the incident. Why? Because it didn’t really happen.”
In his autobiography, Hoffman claimed that there was never as much of a skirmish as people seem to remember, and the convenient lack of photographic or video evidence has only ever served to support those who wish to make up their own fabricated stories about what happened.
Hoffman recalled: “I grabbed the microphone all right and made a little speech about John Sinclair, who had just been sentenced to ten years in the Michigan State Penitentiary for giving two joints of grass to two undercover cops, and how we should take the strength we had at Woodstock home to free our brothers and sisters in jail. Something like that.”
However, his story then appears to divert from how others have always recounted things. “Townshend, who had been tuning up, turned around and bumped into me,” he stated. “A non-incident, really. Hundreds of photos and miles of film exist depicting the events on that stage, but none of this much-talked-about scene.”
There is an audio clip of the incident that lives on in the band’s Thirty Years of Maximum R&B box set, with it simply listed as ‘Abbie Hoffman Incident’ on the tracklist. However, while many seem to have used this and hearsay as proof that Townshend inflicted a violent outburst on the activist and that it was a sequence of events that overshadowed the entire performance while stealing the show, strangely, neither party seems to remember it happening anything like that.
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